My Twilight 25 Oneshots and Drabbles
by perspicuous
Summary: The Twilight 25 prompt responses
1. Chapter 1

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The Twilight Twenty-Five  
Prompt #: 1  
Pen name: perspicuous  
Pairing: N/A  
Rating: M

Photos for prompts can be found here:  
community[dot]livejournal[dot]com/thetwilight25/13912[dot]html

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In a room somewhere, beyond the realms of human knowledge, there are a multitude of hourglasses, one for every person. The sand filters through from the top bulb to the bottom, from the time left in the future to the time spent in the past. Some of the hourglasses are massive, representing long, fulfilling lifetimes, while some are tiny, showing infants taken from the world of the living before they have said their first word.

The hourglasses sit on a set of mahogany bookshelves that stretch as far as the eye can see in both directions. As far as the human eye can see, that is, but more powerful eyes would be able to see that the shelves curve around to form a circle. And if one was to walk to the centre of the circle formed by this room, one would see that there is a clock face embedded into the floor. Instead of the numbers I to XII being detailed around the face, the clock merely has a label at the XII position, and it reads 'The Beginning and The End.' There is just one hand, which moves around the clock relentlessly, slowly but surely approaching the end.

The hourglasses have engraved gold labels detailing the name of the person and the year their life began, relative to the beginning of time. Unsurprisingly, the numbers involved are rather large. And of one was to spend any amount of time in the room, watching the hourglasses, one would notice new hourglasses silently coming into existence, with the top bulb full and the bottom empty, while other hourglasses vanish once the top bulb has emptied of sand and time.

The only sound in the room is that of sand falling, the grains sliding over each other in their haste to arrive at their final resting place, but the room is being watched by Saturn, the guardian of time.

Every hundred years or so, Saturn returned to the land of the living to rekindle the rumours about the room full of hourglasses, as it was important that the humans remembered their limitations; that their time was not inexhaustible; that it would eventually run out.

This was how Edward came to hear about the hourglasses. Circumstance had placed him in the same city as the very people who Saturn had spoken to directly, and he was able to read the memory straight from their minds.

If he had not seen it first hand, in a way at least, he doubted he would have believed it. As it was, it set him thinking again about his existence as a vampire.

That could be the biggest difference about being a vampire, he felt. For humans, it was clear that their time would run out when the sand reached the bottom of their hourglass, but how could this work for vampires? Vampires were clearly frozen in time.

The question in his mind was, did a vampire still have an hourglass, in which the sand was in a permanent state of quiescence, never falling to the bottom bulb, so that the length of time left remained the same, off into infinity, or did a vampire exist out of time, with the hourglass vanishing out of existence when the change was made.

The rest of his family could not see why it mattered so much, and knowing Edward's tendency to become overly loquacious on topics involving existential angst, they wisely declined to argue with him; however this did not prevent him from seeing their opinions on the subject.

Carlisle, ever the optimist, took the opinion that becoming a vampire simply lengthened the life of a person, so he went with the sand in stasis theory.

Esme, also an optimist, with the addition of her compassionate nature, took the same view, reassuring Edward in her mind that vampires had hourglasses in the same way that they had souls, although this backfired due to Edward's reluctance to believe that vampires had souls either.

Emmett genuinely didn't have an opinion either way, and gently mocked Edward for getting so worked up about it.

Rosalie thought that as vampires were dead and lacking in vital aspects of humanity, namely the ability to make a family and to age, they did not have hourglasses, but told Edward to accept it and get over it.

Jasper, unwillingly subjected to all the angst Edward was feeling, was in agreement with Rosalie.

Alice was clearly hiding something, but Edward knew from experience that he would never find out if she didn't want him to, so left well alone.

With his newfound knowledge, Edward was forced to re-examine his rebellious phase. Had he cut off lives when people's hourglasses weren't yet empty; had he stopped the sands of time, interrupting the natural course of things?

As to the application to his own existence, he felt desperate just to know. For if he had an hourglass, he had retained something of his humanity; there was something he had in common with the humans; he was not purely other. However, if the hourglass had vanished as it did when a person died, that was the last element of his previous life gone, lost forever.

Little did any of them know, but neither of their theories were right. In actual fact, there is another room that nobody knows about, for Saturn is ashamed by its existence. And when a human is changed into a vampire, their hourglass is simply moved into this other room, where the gravity is so low that the sand does not appear to move at all. However, move it does, for what Edward and his family had forgotten is that vampires, although immortal, will not necessarily live for ever. There is the danger from their own kind for now, but in the future will come the end of the world as we know it, when the earth will be consumed by the sun. And any vampires left will be consumed with it, defeated by fire, the only thing that can destroy a vampire. So in the end, all the hourglasses will have finished and vanished, and the clock in the room will have reached its pinnacle, and the world will be no more.


	2. Chapter 2

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The Twilight Twenty-Five  
Prompt #: 2  
Pen name: perspicuous  
Pairing: N/A  
Rating: M

Photos for prompts can be found here:  
community[dot]livejournal[dot]com/thetwilight25/13912[dot]html

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Bella Swan did not enjoy her life.

She was not living, merely existing.

She spent her days working long hours in a mind-numbing job at her local supermarket, and her nights sleeping in her tiny bedsit above a dodgy off-licence and a betting shop.

She enjoyed neither.

Her parents were unaware of her malcontent.

She was careful to appear positive in her weekly phone calls to her mother, careful not to mention anything that might arouse any suspicion of the desolation of her life.

One day all of this changed forever.

A man walked into her store and shot her.


End file.
